Sunday, July 01, 2012

Machine afterlife

Been an interesting couple of days. And by interesting, I mean gut-wrenching. There's a long story behind this, but basically my desktop computer -- the one I use to edit books and make covers and live my life on -- begin to die. And die hard.

I reloaded drivers and the operating system and took expansion cards out and talked to four different technicians and paid over $200 to do so. But nothing worked. My seven-year-old system was "outdated," my operating system (XP) was "outdated," the computer's motherboard and BIOS couldn't be updated because it was "outdated." All the techs acted amazed that my system was still limping on. I felt like telling them that it wasn't steam-powered.

So ... yesterday I went to Staples and a bought a Windows 7 desktop computer. It's pretty basic, but it will run Photoshop Elements and my other graphic programs, and it does have Word and Publisher. I'm back in business.

My old system is still sitting on the kitchen table. I'm going to raid it for as many components that function as I can. Then I'm going to try to convert it to a Linux system. I always wanted to try to do that, and I hate losing the old system completely. And it did last long enough for me to move the majority of my data to USB drives and to cloud storage. I'm very attached to that old system -- yes, I know it's a machine, but it served long and well -- so I'm going to try to give it an afterlife.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My greatest fear!

~ Jolene